Mark Twain, a Biography. Complete eBook

people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth.”

We are here to honor the birthday of
the greatest citizen, and the noblest and the
best, after Washington, that this land or any other
has yet produced. The old wounds are healed,
you and we are brothers again; you testify it
by honoring two of us, once soldiers of the Lost
Cause, and foes of your great and good leader—­with
the privilege of assisting here; and we testify
it by laying our honest homage at the feet of
Abraham Lincoln, and in forgetting that you of the
North and we of the South were ever enemies, and remembering
only that we are now indistinguishably fused together
and nameable by one common great name—­Americans!

CCXIV

MARK TWAIN AND THE MISSIONARIES

Mark Twain had really begun his crusade for reform
soon after his arrival in America in a practical hand-to-hand
manner. His housekeeper, Katie Leary, one night
employed a cabman to drive her from the Grand Central
Station to the house at 14 West Tenth Street.
No contract had been made as to price, and when she
arrived there the cabman’s extortionate charge
was refused. He persisted in it, and she sent
into the house for her employer. Of all men,
Mark Twain was the last one to countenance an extortion.
He reasoned with the man kindly enough at first; when
the driver at last became abusive Clemens demanded
his number, which was at first refused. In the
end he paid the legal fare, and in the morning entered
a formal complaint, something altogether unexpected,
for the American public is accustomed to suffering
almost any sort of imposition to avoid trouble and
publicity.

In some notes which Clemens had made in London four
years earlier he wrote:

If you call a policeman to settle the
dispute you can depend on one thing—­he
will decide it against you every time. And so
will the New York policeman. In London if
you carry your case into court the man that is
entitled to win it will win it. In New York—­but
no one carries a cab case into court there.
It is my impression that it is now more than thirty
years since any one has carried a cab case into court
there.

Nevertheless, he was promptly on hand when the case
was called to sustain the charge and to read the cabdrivers’
union and the public in general a lesson in good-citizenship.
At the end of the hearing, to a representative of
the union he said:

“This is not a matter of sentiment, my dear
sir. It is simply practical business. You
cannot imagine that I am making money wasting an hour
or two of my time prosecuting a case in which I can
have no personal interest whatever. I am doing
this just as any citizen should do. He has no
choice. He has a distinct duty. He is a non-classified
policeman. Every citizen is, a policeman, and
it is his duty to assist the police and the magistracy